The Critical Consensus On Falling Glass

When you've finished writing a novel you have no idea how it's going to be received. It's definitely not like the moment when Paul McCartney played Hey Jude for the rest of the Beatles and everyone in the room knew that they were listening to a classic. No, books are much more subjective. For every person who loves Naked Lunch and thinks it's a masterpiece there are ten who hate it. There are exceptions...I've yet to find someone who hates Charlotte's Web but I'm sure there is a nutter out there somewhere who doesn't dig it. (Apologies if you are that nutter.)
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When I finished editing Falling Glass last October I hated the bloody book. I'd read it through half a dozen times and that was enough to kill any love I had for the jokes, the set pieces, the characters etc. I was also discouraged by the rejections I was getting from American publishers who felt it "wasn't commercial enough." My old house, Scribner, passed, Henry Holt passed, St Martin's passed. We started showing it to smaller presses who often boast about publishing "outsider voices from different perspectives" etc. and they all said no too. My Australian publishers didn't even tell me when the book was coming out and I only knew it was out here because I happened to chance upon it in a shop. 
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My UK publishers Serpents Tail liked it but they've always been very supportive of me and I did wonder if secretly they hated it and just wanted to spare my feelings. I'll chalk it up to experience I thought. No one wants to read a noir story about Irish Travellers in contemporary Ireland. I'll know better next time...
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But then the reviews started coming in...And the reviews told a vastly different story from what the voices in my head were saying. Spinetingler Magazine was one of the first out of the gate and they loved the book. Spinetingler ran a review and an extract and an interview. The next review I read was in The Guardian newspaper and the Guardian loved it too. Next came an extremely positive review in the Irish Times (and this from a paper who have sent me a few rockets in the past). Last week I got a lengthy write up at The Crime Of It All and just yesterday I got a great review in the Irish Independent from Declan Burke - a man who knows his onions where crime fiction is concerned. Declan's review was interesting because Falling Glass got the lead in the paper above John Banville's latest novel. There have been other reviews along the way on blogs, in newspapers and on Amazon. The only people I've come across who really disliked Falling Glass were a couple of listeners on Audible who couldn't get into the story or "found the narrator dry" whatever that means. My old pal Bookwitch wasn't convinced by the ending and I've had a few emails from people who also felt the same...In general though, as I said in a blog post last week, this is the best reviewed book I've had since Dead I Well May Be.
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Johnny Foreigner has also gotten on board. Serpents Tail have sold the rights to Germany, France and a couple of other EU countries which means that you can get Falling Glass in the entire British Commonwealth and most of Europe but, crucially, not North America. I have to say that I beg to differ with all the American publishers who claim that the book is not commercial in the US market. There is one place and only one place where Falling Glass is available in the US and that's on Audible.com. On Audible, as of today I've had 132 ratings, an average rating of 4.11 (out of 5), and twenty one written reviews.  By way of comparison, despite heavy advertising, a recent profile in The New Yorker, radio and TV interviews and a book tour, the latest John Banville crime novel has 10 ratings, 1 customer review and an average rating of 3.30. I'm not knocking Banville but I am knocking the US publishers who think there is no market for me or my novels. The listeners and - a fortiori - the readers are out there!
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Before I get off this solipsistic topic forever I would like to thank EVERYONE who has written a review of any of my books on Good Reads, on a blog, on Audible, in print, on any of the Amazons etc. I do read all the reviews and I take seriously what people say. I often completely disagree with you but if you've taken the trouble to review my book I will read it. And even if the corporate suits in mid town Manhattan don't want to take a chance on me, well there's nothing I can do about that, but I sure do appreciate your support. Go raibh maith agaibh

Down These Green Streets

On his blog today Dec Burke announces the publication of Down These Green Streets, the definitive look at the history of Irish crime writing. For whatever reason crime fiction in Ireland today has become the dominant genre for this generation's writing talent. So called literary fiction is going through a stage of moribund middle class angst, the best Irish plays are being written by Englishmen, and contemporary Irish poetry probably peaked in the 70's with the circle around Seamus Heaney at Queens University Belfast. Almost all the exciting developments in Irish prose and certainly the most interesting Irish novels of the last twenty years have been in the crime fiction genre. Why is this the case? Read the book and you'll find out. There are essays by Dec Burke, Colin Bateman, John Banville, John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Stu Neville, Adrian McKinty, Tana French, et. al. The preface is written by one Michael Connolly and there's an afterword by Fintan O'Toole.  

Blood's A Rover

JAMES Ellroy, a devoted boxing aficionado, is a little like the Joe Frazier of American letters. While Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy get spoken of as contenders for the title of America's greatest novelist, Ellroy often gets dismissed as a mere crime writer. His amour-propre, his past as a teenage neo-Nazi and the fact he writes about that most gauche place, Los Angeles, has never endeared him to the literary establishment. 

Blood's a Rover, however, may well change their opinion. It is the completion of Ellroy's near 2000-page American Underworld trilogy that began with the evocative American Tabloid and continued with the extraordinary The Cold Six Thousand. 

American Tabloid is a technically impressive and often brilliant novel structured around the Cuban revolution and John Kennedy's assassination, written in a clipped ultra-telegraphic prose style that reinvents American crime fiction in a way no writer has attempted to do since the 1920s. 

Harsh, single word, verbless sentences pile on top of one another like the dripping tap of a water torturer, producing a hypnotic, trance-like effect that repels as many readers as it seduces. 

But where American Tabloid is a book teetering on the edge of a cliff, The Cold Six Thousand jumps into the abyss with an even sparer haiku-like prose style and a complex narrative of conspiracies, invasions and cover-ups starting with JFK's murder and ending with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. 

Blood's a Rover breathlessly continues the story in the days following King's death in Memphis. The central characters are the ones we got to know (and in most cases dislike) in The Cold Six Thousand: the conspirators who planned the hits on both Kennedy brothers and MLK. 

If this sounds a bit crazy, well, it is. 

In Ellroy's America (and one assumes he does not actually believe this) King was shot by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI working with the mafia, Cuban exiles and the CIA. King's murder incites rioting in America's black ghettoes and Richard Nixon rides the conservative backlash to get elected with a little help from the mob, Dominican drug dealers, an ex-FBI macher called Dwight Holly and a murderous ex-Las Vegas cop, Wayne Tedrow Jr, who ended book two of the trilogy by helping beat his father to death with a golf club. 

To complete the Freudian triad of central protagonists in Blood's a Rover we are introduced to the new character of Donald Crutchfield, a neophyte private investigator, voyeur and pervert. 

Ellroy has described himself as the Tolstoy of crime fiction and Crutch is transparently Ellroy's Pierre Bezukhov, a mostly sympathetic avatar of the novelist who gets his kicks (as Ellroy once did) by breaking into women's homes to sniff their underwear. We follow these diverse sociopaths on a wild ride through the politics, controversy and insanity of America in the 70s, with Ellroy gleefully libelling the conveniently dead Nixon, Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Howard Hughes, who were all in on the whole Kennedy thing. 

And, yes, I know this is a novel and not history but I still find it a little disturbing that Ellroy absolves real-life individuals such as Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, all of whom are patsies in the wider conspiracy. 

Then again, maybe that is the point, as in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Ellroy's world is not quite our world: this is an alternative 1970s, a slightly darker America where intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex and very rich men are the sinister puppet masters. 

Ellroy's strengths are his descriptions of men of action doing violent deeds or preparing for them. In these scenes his writing jumps off the page and his language is ironic, cynical and at times humorous. Watching professionals do their job can be a lot of fun, even if they are ice-cold killers. 

The writing in Blood's a Rover is Ellroy at his most confident and mature; the staccato prose style has been dialled down a notch from The Cold Six Thousand and the plot is inventive, surprising and, because we are still talking about a crime novel here, exciting. Ellroy's weaknesses are his weirder flights of fancy, the occasionally peculiar motivations of his characters and his female leads who, although given much more room to breathe in this book, still act and talk like few women any of us would recognise. 

Blood's a Rover is a line from A. E. Housman, which gives you a clue to Ellroy's sensibility; as George Orwell noted in his essay Inside the Whale, Housman is the poet par excellence for men baffled by "treacherous, half-human" women. (Although perhaps a writer whose mother was murdered by persons unknown when he was 10 should be cut a little slack.) 

Ellroy's language, too, can be offputting, riddled as it is with ethnic slurs and homophobia, but it is a canard to accuse Ellroy of racism; he is an ironist, not a racist, and the entire American Underworld trilogy can be read as an apocalyptic parable about the rise of fascism. 

Blood's a Rover is not quite the masterpiece that was The Cold Six Thousand but it is an ambitious, bold, outrageous, over the top tour de force that confirms Ellroy's place as one of the most important living novelists in the US. 

I tackled (I use the word advisedly) the book in two sittings and it will almost certainly in my top 10 crime novels of the year. While Ellroy may never be the favoured son among the New York literary elite, he has shown with this trilogy that he can go 15 rounds with Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth or any other heavyweight American novelist you care to name.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Down These Green Streets

Archmage and Grand Vizier of Crime Always Pays Declan Burke has taken another step along his path towards world domination by releasing further details of the book Down These Green Streets - the first, only, and surely to be definitive essay collection on the history of Irish crime fiction. Declan (don't call him Dekkers) had the idea a few moons ago, he pitched it to those boffins and egg heads at the Irish Arts Council and they unsurprisingly gave him the go ahead. The snowball has rolled to such an extent that serious names have got on board (ok I know this is a mixed metaphor just relax) including Booker Prize winner John Banville, best selling (and prize winning) novelist and screenwriter Colin Bateman and the brilliant and inscrutable Eoin MacNamee to name but a few. Mr. Burke has even dropped hints of trans-Atlantic contributors of the very big gun variety which he will reveal in the fullness of time. Down These Green Streets also comes equipped with a title pun so good I think it displaces my own personal favourite We'll Always Have Parrots by Donna Andrews.